Charley Toorop

Life

Charley Toorop was born in Katwijk. She was the daughter of Jan Toorop and Annie Hall. She married the philosopher Henk Fernhout in May 1912, but they divorced in 1917. Her son Edgar Fernhout (1912–1974) also became a painter. Her other son, John Fernhout (1913–1987), became a filmmaker, and often worked together with Joris Ivens. As a filmmaker he sometimes used the name John Ferno. Charley's daughter in law was the well-known Jewish photographer Eva Besnyö (1910–2003), who married John in 1933.

In the on-line biography of the Dutch poet Hendrik Marsman on the website of the Dutch Literary Museum Charley Toorop is mentioned as one of the women who had a relationship with Marsman before he married in 1929 his wife Rien Barendregt.

Work

Charley Toorop became a member of the group of artists called Het Signaal (The Signal) in 1916. The group aimed at depicting a deep sense of reality through the use of colours and heavily accentuated lines and through fierce contrasts of colours. This is one of the reasons why Toorop is seen as adherent to the Bergense School.

Toorop was befriended to other artists, for example to Bart van der Leck and Piet Mondriaan. In 1926 Charley Toorop went to live for two years in Amsterdam, where her painting became influenced by film. Frontally depicted figures stand isolated from each other, as if lit by lamps at a movie set. Her still lifes show kinship to the synthetic cubism of Juan Gris. From the 1930s onwards, she painted many female figures, as well as nudes and self-portraits in a powerful, realistic style. Well-known is her large painting Three Generations (Drie generaties) (1941–1950; in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam), which is a self-portrait, a portrait of her father and of her son Edgar, in which she unites both realism and a sense of symbolism.

Her ruthless realism has a magic touch. "Is the natural appearance reality," she wondered in 1917, "or can we sense in its form only the most unreal that appears before us? This unreal, which is the most real."

Toorop had lived at many different places, but from 1932 on she resided in Bergen, North Holland, a town she'd previously had her home between 1912-1915 and 1922-1926. There she designed and commissioned a house called "De Vlerken", situated at the Buerweg 19. The house is still there, although after a fire its thatched roof has been replaced by a tiled roof. Charley Toorop died in Bergen on November 5, 1955. Her works are in many public collections, notably in the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo.

Literature

Exhibitions (selection)

Public collections